Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!pyrdc!pyrnj!rutgers!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: i++, i+=1, i=i+1
Message-ID: <3629@lanl.gov>
Date: 15 Sep 88 17:04:52 GMT
References: <13566@mimsy.UUCP>
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 16

From article <13566@mimsy.UUCP>, by chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek):
> Also agreed.  Convenience, however, makes all the difference.  I, as
> a reader, would much rather see as an English description the phrase
> `add 1 to i' than `evaluate i, evaluate the integer constant 1, add
> the values together, and store the result in the location named by i'.

My english description of 'i = i + 1' _is_ "add 1 to i".  the difference
between that and 'i += 1' is purely textual.  It's easy to write a
preprocessor to switch the later to the former.  Such a preprocessor
needn't have _any_ semantic knowledge of the target language.  It need
only look for '+='  and replace it with '= _X_' where _X_ is whatever
token preceeds the '+='.  In other words, as far as functionality
goes, '+=" doesn't do a damn thing.

J. Giles
Los Alamos